Low Life: The Spectator Columns

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May 2023: ‘When Marketa leaves, Treena supervises the cleaning of my gob. On the bed table she lays out a hand towel, a tooth mug with warm water in it, a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste and three paper towels to spit into. She also places upon the table an anti-fungal mouthwash. Mouth fungus, apparently, is an inevitable side result of these cancer treatments. Unfortunately, by kissing her too frequently and too passionately, and vice versa, I have passed mine on to Catriona. I might have also suspected that that tagline promised a degree of acerbic social commentary. I might have been wrong about that last bit. There will be a memorial service for him, the details of which will be arranged in due course. The Spectator will be paying tribute to him in next week’s magazine. For now, we have his columns to treasure: a legacy that has enriched, and will continue to enrich, the lives of everyone who comes across them. His column was not a study in ‘low life’ drink and debauchery, although there was certainly plenty of that. The theme that I drew from them, especially in his references to Catriona, was about the role and power of love: its ability to magnify and transform the smallest, most seemingly insignificant parts of life.

Jeremy became a friend of mine soon after he had established himself as essential weekly reading. For over fifteen years he would join a party of “rogues and funsters” for the annual Racing Festival at Cheltenham in March. It was an eclectic group who somehow managed to gel over a three, then four, day festival of drinking, gambling, storytelling and, of course, enjoying the racing too. Jeremy could get on with anyone. One year at lunch he was sitting next to the then Chairman of The Prudential who admired his tweed suit. “Got it from The Oxfam Shop for a tenner on the way here,” Jeremy admitted. The businessman didn’t know he was not joking. But, meanwhile, he was diagnosed in 2013 with prostate cancer and introduced to “the Elizabethan drama of the oncologist’s consulting room – always a door opening and someone coming in bearing grave news”. The habitual joie de vivre of Low Life was thereafter tempered by frequent medical bulletins, sometimes signalling remission, more often something worse ahead. Philip, there’s a man here writing about going to the Cheltenham Festival and messing his pents.’ ‘Very easily done at Cheltenham, my dear. I’ve often wondered why nobody has written about it before.’ Or, ‘Philip here’s that man again, the one who messed his pents at Cheltenham, assisting the ferret-judging at a country show. It’s frightfully interesting. The judge takes so long to judge each class, they drive a car into the tent so that he can judge them in the headlights.’ ‘Does he mess his pents again?’ ‘He doesn’t say.’” TikTokApril 25, 2020: “She reached down and slid open the bottom drawer of her desk, showing about 100 vodka miniatures. I nodded complicity. She emptied four into two plastic water cups. “Have you got anything to go with it?” I said, which wasn’t very Low Life-like of me. She reached down and pulled out the lower drawer of her neighbor’s desk and rummaged in it, emerging eventually with a medicine bottle of kaolin and morphine.” Communists and fascists If he never quite achieved that ambition, he was certainly an intellectual manqué, whose secret vice during his roughhouse youth was an unquenchable thirst for reading. April 2023: ‘I’m going downhill fast. The numb fingers of my left hand are barely strong enough to unscrew the cap from a tube of toothpaste. And the morphine dose occasionally still fails to mask the pain, which achieves an unsurmised, unimaginable, unsupportable level. It makes one wonder what role in nature that level of pain is supposed to be playing.“Treena,”I say.“I don’t think I want to live any more.”Then I swallow a big short-acting morphine dose and after half an hour the pain subsides slightly, and I have a sip of tea, and I can hear a choir of village children singing over at the school, and a soppy dove almost flies in through the open window, and life has interest once more.’ On love Jeremy’s self-effacement was almost as endearing as his infectious laughter. He was genuinely surprised by the high esteem in which his readers held him and I’m sure this helped him in his battle against his painful illness. August 2005: ‘Once you’ve been doing it for a while, it’s not easy to stop being a low life. There’s nothing people enjoy more than watching someone going to hell on a poker, and they rather resent it if that person suddenly decides he wants to get off. No one objects in principle to an idle, self-centred, addicted life, as long as it ends prematurely in lonely and squalid circumstances and everyone can read about it in the papers. Renege on the deal, like a footballer in mid-contract, and people feel cheated.’ On drugs

I told him I thought I was more or less finished. Gilles wasn’t having any of that kind of defeatist talk. At rest, his slanting French eyebrows oppose one another like one acute and one grave accent. As he manoeuvred our way out of the enormous hospital they became tautly horizontal as he made an impassioned speech about never giving up, about fighting on to the beaches, about not thinking of myself in this fight, but of those who love me. The heartfelt outpouring lasted several minutes. I didn’t know where to look. When we approached the village where we both live, I commented on the variety of tree blossom and the advancing season. The eyebrows stood smartly to attention. He too was a man who noticed such things. December 7, 2013: “I couldn’t believe it: 3 a.m in the bohemian quarter of the greatest city on earth and you can’t get a reasonably priced drink anywhere? What was I supposed to do next? Go home? Boris! Are you listening! It’s an absolute disgrace!” Grandsons But Clarke was not, as he feared, a short walk from the gallows. He learned that new drugs and immunotherapy treatments meant that most men with prostate cancer were alive 10 years after the diagnosis: April 2014: ‘The young amateur boxers dash over to their father — their favourite punchbag — climb up on to his chair, and administer a damn good leathering. Their father cowers weakly in his chair as the blows rain down.“Good day at the office?”I ask him. He looks out at me between the blows and I get another one of those desperate looks.’ On Pamplona April 2020:‘She reached down and slid open the bottom drawer of her desk, showing about 100 vodka miniatures. I nodded complicity. She emptied four into two plastic water cups. “Have you got anything to go withit?” I said, which wasn’t very Low Life-like of me. She reached down and pulled out the lower drawer of her neighbour’s desk and rummaged in it, emerging eventually with a medicine bottle of kaolin and morphine.’ Communists and fascistsFans of the column – he's described as a cult columnist so there must be some such – will no doubt welcome the chance to reacquaint themselves with past episodes. Newcomers like me may have no idea what to expect. April 15, 2023: “I’m going downhill fast. The numb fingers of my left hand are barely strong enough to unscrew the cap from a tube of toothpaste. And the morphine dose occasionally still fails to mask the pain, which achieves an unsurmised, unimaginable, unsupportable level. It makes one wonder what role in nature that level of pain is supposed to be playing. ‘Treena,’ I say. ‘I don’t think I want to live any more.’ Then I swallow a big short-acting morphine dose and after half an hour the pain subsides slightly, and I have a sip of tea, and I can hear a choir of village children singing over at the school, and a soppy dove almost flies in through the open window, and life has interest once more.” The end